Trading team continues Fordham’s first-place tradition
Announcements | Nov 21, 2016 | Gabelli School of Business
For the third year in a row, a Gabelli School MS in Quantitative Finance team earned first place overall at the annual competition. This year, another Fordham team also came in third.
The 2016 winning teams were: in first place, John Mitchell, MS ’16, and Yiqian Zhang and Yuan Zhou, both MS ’17; and in third place, Sean Burke, MS ’17, and Aoxiang Jian and Shuonan Zhang, both MS ’18.
Douglas Blackburn, assistant professor and director of the MSQF program, says competitions like this one are an important part of students’ education.
“Competing against other universities encourages them to work closely as a team, research and implement new ideas to solve realistic financial problems, and present final results in a clear and convincing way. This is exactly what they will be doing after graduation. That their efforts were so greatly rewarded is icing on the cake.”
The winning students agree.
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Third-place team: Aoxiang Jian, Shuonan Zhang, and Sean Burke“The most important thing I learned from this competition is that self-control is extremely crucial for a trader,” says Aoxiang Jian.
Yiqian Zhang notes that “fast learning is really important in the competition … my teammates encouraged and helped each other.”
One takeaway that could help future competitors comes from John Mitchell. He explains how, in this challenge, total profit isn’t everything; risk must be taken into account.
He also learned that “being the best at one thing is good, but our team was well-rounded in everything and that is how we won.”
Congratulations to both teams for keeping Fordham’s impressive winning streak alive.
